TechnocratTechnocrat’s Random Thoughts

To expand on my previous post of development tools I use, these are the internet tools I use.

First tool is Firefox.  If you are still using IE as your primary browser, you should stop.  IE sucks to put it nicely.  It’s slow and doesn’t follow the internet standards.  IE 8 may change all that but that’s down the road.  For now I would suggest using Firefox.  Opera and Chrome are good alts but I think FF offers the most bang.  You can get custom skins and the plugins for it are outstanding.  When the next version comes out of beta it will out render almost all the current browsers out there.

For the addons I use in Firefox there are a couple of really important ones to me.  First is Firebug.  It allows you to debug javascript and html issues.  It’s not the most user friendly and sometimes doesn’t work right.  But when it does it helps alot.

I also use Foxmarks to keep my bookmarks synced between computers.  Also if you loose your PC you can get your bookmarks back really quickly.  Also you can access all of them online which is nice.

Another one I can’t live with out is Autocopy.  It automatically copies anything you hightlight.  No more ctrl+c or right click copy.  It has a few other features but thats all I use it for.  If you go for this one you need to find the project homepage to download it.  The version on mozilla doesn’t work right.  Not sure why they haven’t updated it.

StumbleUpon is another awesome addon.  It takes you to random websites in categories you choose.  Its will take you to pages you might otherwise never go to.  I have found tons of useful tools and information with it.

The final Firefox tool is Web Developer.  It allows you to do a number of html tasks.  The one I use the most is validate html.  But you can do a ton of other things, like edit CSS or HTML on the fly.  It’s VERY powerful and useful.

Another tool that I use ALOT is GetRight.  It’s not free but for $25 I think you get a very powerful downloader.  You can split downloads into parts and get it from various sources.  You can also pause and resume downloads.  Using it with the flashgot addon for FF and you have an awesome downloading tool.

The final tool I am going to put out their is Microsoft Live’s sync.  It allows you to sync folders over the internet across multiple PCs.  Comes in handy when you need to keep a folder synced for projects and such.

That’s all I got for now

I don’t get as much time as I would like to play games any more.  But when I do I don’t waste my time on crappy games.  Anything that doesn’t get me right off the bat goes back, or get’s uninstalled.  That said I have played two games I really enjoy and thought I would share with you.

Saints Row 2 is going to have the label poor mans GTA.  Well that’s not a bad thing in my book.  To me there are a couple of things that make this game better than GTA.  First off there is no annoying phone calls.  No cousin calling you every other day to go out on a date.  The game is all about having fun and destroying things.  There is no real life moral dalemas, no real life keeping friends, no real life really at all.  It’s just well….fun.

Secondly is the HUGE amount of customization that is SORELY missing from GTA.  You can customize almost everything.  Your looks, your clothes, your cars, etc.  You can do it at almost anytime.   Makes the game much more interesting and more replay-able.

Finally the missions are easy to spot and the objects are pretty clear.  You know right where to go to get a mission and what to do when you get there.

It’s not a perfect game by any means.  The graphics are well mediocre.  But if you want to just have fun killing and destorying things for a couple of weeks (or days) check it out.

The next game is left 4 dead.  I have to say once again Value knocks one out of the park.  It’s 100% co-op game play, which can be good and bad depending on who you are playing with.  Having a mic is almost a must.  By the time you type something it can be too late.  It’s scary and great fun to play.

I do have one gripe about it.  The cost vs the amount of game play.  5 levels just doesn’t seem to be enough to justify $50 in my mind.  I sure hope the downloadable content starts flowing soon.  Plus they add the ability to make levels.  If not this game is going to be left for dead quickly as it will get played out.

Today pretty much marks the end of phpBB 2.0.x.  It has now been offically replaced with v3.  It was a good product and has stood the test of time really well.  I am a bit sad to see it go but it’s time for it.

People ask all the time what tools I use in development.  I have a pretty long list of stuff I use, but I will cut it down to the most important things I feel people would be interested in knowing.

For PHP, javascript, and HTML development I use Zend Studio.  It’s not free, but by far the best development tool out there.  I have tried all the other php development packages both free and paid and though some of them are pretty good, its hard to beat Zend Studio for me.  I recently switched from 5 to 6 for Eclipse.  When 6 first came out it was buggy as hell.  6.1 finally fixed almost everything.  Though there are still a few annoyances it’s finally at a point that I can use it and not get too pissed at it.

My FTP client is FlashFXP.  Again not a free product and thinking ahead none of my choices will be so I should just get that out of the way now.  I used to do a ton of FTP’ing in a past life (Shout to EsC and EsX brothers RIP).   If you did what I did nothing is better than FlashFXP.  So this choice is a hold over for me.  I still like its uncluttered interface and ability to do things like search and ignore files and folders.   CuteFTP and SImpleFTP just dont do it for me.

Another MUST have is a tool to examine differences in files.  For me its examDiff Pro.  It’s extremely powerful and very user friendly.  None of the other products are even close in my opinion.

My final tool is TextPad for creating and modify text files (or other text based files such as SQL).  It has a number of great features and abilities such as reg searching.

Anyways I hope you find these tools to be as helpful as I do.

I was talking to someone who was writing a blog post about different CMSs.  I am sure they are wondering why they picked me after my comments during the conversation.  Here are some of the things I responded to.

How do you think Nuke-Evolution is seen in the CMS world?
Very poorly!  We have never got any respect from anyone in the CMS world.  For example we have been a packetpub finalist twice.  TWICE!  How many other nuke versions have done that?  None!  Yet places like opensourcecms.com refuse to list us.  Why!?  I wish I could tell you but they seem to generally ignore us.

The people at Wikipedia didn’t feel that we had enough of a following to have our own page.  Really!?  We have the second highest user percentage behind only the original nuke flavor.  We are in the top five of total users on a nuke site.  We have had many translations and sister sites in different countries.  What else do you need to qualify?

I still get a bunch of grief on different sites when they find I work on a phpNuke project.  Their biggest argument is that it is insecure.  Well the original flavor was (probably still is) for sure.  Do you know how many times a major secruity flaw has been found that would allow hackers into your site with Evo?  Once.  One time and it was in the original Evo release.  We patched it one hour after it was found.  I don’t know for sure how many sites were affected by the number that were reported to us was 5.  5 sites seems like a pretty good number when it was downloaded 5,000 times at that point. Sure there have been other security issues found but none of them have the ability to get past the security we have implemented.  So the argument of poor security doesn’t fly.

They also state the phpNuke is slow and outdated.  That’s true to a degree.  We have done so many things to strengthen and improve Nuke that we barely recognize as it once was.  Evo and Nuke are not even in the same league anymore.  Is Evo perfect, no.  But I think it can hold its own against other CMSs.

What is the future of phpNuke?
There isn’t one.  Nuke is dying a slow death.  FB (the original author of Nuke) let Nuke fall apart.  He didn’t listen to his users, ignored security issues, and let the project become stale and outdated.  Now with phpBB ending the 2.0.x branch there is a nail slowly being hammered into Nuke’s coffin.  Is it the final nail?  Hard to say for sure.  My opinion is yes.

Nukes days are numbered.  I am not sure how big that number is but it’s counting down.

There were some other questions but they weren’t anything big.  I wonder if he will actually post this??

I just updated this sites version of wordpress to 2.7.  Nice!  Bunch of new features.  Faster.  Better layout.  I like it alot!

I haven’t been on as much the last two months and that’s due to a number of things.

First off I have been working on a rather large project for a company.  It’s turned into something bigger than I expected.  Like I guess most projects.  I am closing in on finishing and I hope that will free up more time soon.

Secondly I have had a ton of personal issues to deal with.  Started with my father-in-law getting bladder cancer.  Then my mother having kiddney issues.  I guess when it rains it poors.

I wanted so badly to have the Alpha of phpBB-Evolution done by Jan but I just don’t see that happening.  I haven’t been able to free up enough time.    So lets hope for more next year.

So I have tested all my first set of indexes and after realizing that going overboard was a bad idea.  But I have some more that have really helped.  This will probably be my last set of them.

ALTER TABLE `nuke_stories_cat` ADD INDEX ( `title` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_donators` ADD INDEX ( `dondate` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_downloads_downloads` ADD INDEX ( `hits` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_downloads_downloads` ADD INDEX ( `active` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_evo_userinfo` ADD INDEX ( `active` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_modules` ADD INDEX `active_inmenu_catid` ( `active` , `inmenu` , `cat_id` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_modules_cat` ADD INDEX ( `pos` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_modules` ADD INDEX ( `inmenu` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_users` ADD INDEX ( `user_level` );

Over the last few days I have been expanding my knowledge on MySQL indexes along with other useful tidbits.  I am not super strong on SQL.  I know enough to get by but it’s an area I would like to know more about.

Anyways after reading some good articles I began to find areas where we can improve both phpBB-Evolution and Nuke-Evolution.  One of which is the lack of proper indexing.  Nuke is a villain when it comes to this.  The indexing in its piss poor to put it nicely.  So I figured it would be a good place to implement some of the ideas I have found.  No better place to do it than the NE site….right!?

So I started going through and making better indexing.  I started with the core files and I just got done.  I have to say the difference is extremely noticeable.  I can already tell the page is loading much faster in many areas.  I also turned off the optimizing so I can see what tables get overhead and I can use that as a key as to what needs fixing.  So we shall see what the effects are long term but so far it has been positive.

If you are interested I have been keeping note on what I have done.  So give it a try if you want.

[UPDATE] So I went too far with some indexing.  Though it sped up the site it took up to much memory and caused SQL to crash   so I had to reboot the server and the site was down for a day.  So I took out the biggest indexes and I am leaving just the ones that I think will help and not cause memory issues.  Enjoy.

ALTER TABLE `nuke_modules` ADD INDEX ( `active` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_blocks` ADD INDEX `active_weight` ( `active` , `weight` )  ;
ALTER TABLE `nuke_blocks` ADD INDEX `time_bid` ( `time` , `bid` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_stories` ADD INDEX `topic_ihome_time` ( `topic` , `ihome` , `time` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_stories` ADD INDEX `topic_sid` ( `topic` , `sid` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_banner` ADD INDEX `position_active` ( `position` , `active` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_session` ADD INDEX ( `uname` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_evolution` ADD INDEX ( `evo_field` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_bbadvanced_username_color` ADD INDEX `groupid_groupweight` ( `group_id` , `group_weight` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_bbranks` ADD INDEX `rankspecial_rankmin` ( `rank_special` , `rank_min` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_bbcategories` ADD INDEX ( `cat_title` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_themes` ADD INDEX ( `theme_name` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_nsnst_admins` ADD INDEX ( `password_md5` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_session` ADD INDEX `guest_uname` ( `guest` , `uname` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_session` ADD INDEX ( `host_addr` );
ALTER TABLE `nuke_bbadvanced_username_color` ADD INDEX ( `group_name` );

The Daily Show is one of my favorite shows to watch on TV.  I am a huge Jon Steward fan, not because he is funny (which he is), but because he is intelligent and meaningful in what he does.  The show isn’t there to make jokes but to point out situations that you have to make fun of or it will drive you crazy. Sure he hides it in his self deprecating humor some times but in the end you can learn alot by watching it.

I had never seen this clip before but I have to say this is an amazing piece of footage.  By far one of the more touching things on the original 9/11 day.  Bravo, Mr Steward, Bravo!